


Things Fall Apart

by stardustandfantasies



Category: Padz and Friends (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Ambiguous Slash, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-15
Updated: 2018-12-15
Packaged: 2019-09-19 12:49:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17001975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stardustandfantasies/pseuds/stardustandfantasies
Summary: Fixing people had always been Dika's job, not his. He fixed things, not people.(He couldn't even fix himself.)





	Things Fall Apart

**Author's Note:**

> Written in 2017; I feel like posting it here because I'm doing Achebe's _Things Fall Apart_ in my Intro to English Lit class. This fic owes its title to that book (and, by extension, Yeats' poem).
> 
> This is a part of my low fantasy AU idea, which I had toyed with for quite some time but never really developed. Basically, there's kingdom ruled by a corrupt king, and Joyo and Dika are part of the Resistance led by Daniel. The fic is set after the fall of the king. I extrapolated Joyo and Dika's personality from the one panel in which they appear, plus consulting Rosy and Ochak. I hope I did them justice.
> 
> And BECAUSE I AM A GENIUS I deleted the blog post that had the final version of this fic. The backup document doesn't contain the (quite substantial) edits I made on the deleted post, so I have to edit it from memory...

Their arrival was greeted with desperation, as it was in the previous village, and the places they visited before that. Arya was the first to jumped out of the wagon, immediately ordering the villagers who were starting to swarm around their train to line up before volunteers could start distributing food and water.

Their crew had been doing this for a few months since the fall of the old king. The corrupt kingdom was no more, but its legacy—widespread poverty and destruction from war—remained. It had become sort of a routine for them now.

Joyo and his team went around to see what they could mend. They taught the people to repair broken windows and locks and collect water. They were engineers; they could make the most out of scraps.

The medical crew, on the other hand, were running out of supplies and medicines. The war rendered too many people injured and malnourished, and often their help came too late. The team did whatever best they could with what they had, but there were still too many souls broken beyond repair, too many lives gone, irretrievable. War was one thing, but its aftermath was another, its terror equally sinister.

When the Rebellion announced the end of the old King's tyranny, everyone celebrated, but General Daniel— _President_ Daniel now, Joyo had to remind himself—did not smile.

“This is not the end of our struggle,” he said, “this is the beginning of our real struggle.”

When Dika had first propose the idea going of around the country to send supplies, Joyo had been the first to volunteer. He didn't know why, but moving around and doing something, anything, was better than staying in the Capital with memories of friends who had fallen in their fight for freedom.

Dika was talking to a mother with her young son in her arms. She said the boy was five years old, but he was tiny, too tiny for his age, although his stomach was too big for his skeletal frame. Tears trickled down the mother's emaciated cheeks as she pleaded him to save her son. The boy's eyes did not have the bright innocent gaze of a child, but the blank stare of a dying old man.

Dika smiled his ever so unwavering smile and spoke to her calmly. The woman left with a small pouch and a little renewed hope, but Dika’s smile—his ever so unwavering smile—faltered when she turned away. Joyo had seen Dika work miracles, but there were things that not even miracles could save. The boy was one of them. Dika knew that, too.

Joyo only understood what Daniel meant now.

* * *

They were too many people injured by the war, and too few healers, so Dika and the other medics taught the rest of their crew how to tend to more common injuries: cuts, scrapes, sprains, broken bones.

“These are the easier ones to aid,” Dika said. If those were the better ones, Joyo couldn't imagine how he managed to treat the worse ones.

How Dika managed to pull through was a greater wonder. Dika was always smiling, his voice always kind as he explained and calmed and reassured the sick and injured and their families. He had a soothing presence, Joyo noticed as he quietly observed a faint glimmer of hope resurrected in those tired eyes (he didn't have an ounce of it in himself, but he could recognise faith when he saw it).

He tried comforting the people too, to ease some of the medics’ responsibilities. But his words always came out too harsh, and no one seemed convinced with him. Maybe others could see that he himself didn't have any faith left.

He had to accept that he could never be as good as Dika. Fixing people had always been Dika's job, not his. He's an engineer, not a doctor. He fixed things, not people.

(He couldn't even fix himself.)

* * *

Dika took great pains to not only heal, but also listen and console everyone who came to him. He insisted that it's necessary for a man trained in the medical profession.

“Their bodies aren't the only thing that is hurting, they have wounds in their soul too,” he'd argued, “and the body can't be healthy if the mind isn't.”

The other medics, who looked up to him, followed suit.

But even Joyo could see that Dika was doing more than he needed to do, and that he's straining himself in doing that.

Dika knew their names, their stories, their sorrow. He carried all of them within him, and only at night did the weight of the burden start sinking in and terrorise him. He dreamt of gaunt figures reaching out towards him, their wounds gaping, bleeding, decaying, their bodies incomplete, with missing limbs here and there and one eye socket empty like an abyss.

The first time it happened, he'd woken up sweating, but someone was holding him.

“Dika,” he called. His voice was warm and soft, not the harrowing lifeless echoes he kept hearing in his dream. “Dika.”

“Joyo?” Dika began to recognise the friend he shared a tent with. “I'm sorry to wake you up.”

“You didn't." Dika wasn't the only one who's kept awake at night by nightmares.

Joyo put his cool palm on Dika’s damp cheeks.

“You're crying. You alright?” he asked, even though he knew Dika was weeping for the people he couldn't save, for the families whose grief he couldn't appease, for the horrors that should've had not happened.

“It’s just a nightmare.” Dika laughed; the sound was tired and strained, much like himself. “But a terrible one. I saw things. Hear voices. Their voices.” It was almost painful to hear him speak like that, devoid of all the calm and conviction he usually had when talking to his patients. Joyo didn't ask whose voices those were. “I could've done more for them.”

Joyo wanted to say something to soothe the worries that contorted his usually kind face, but he couldn't.

(He still had no idea how to fix people.)

He held Dika until he gradually calmed down.

Dika didn't say anything in the morning, which was unlike him, but he didn't say anything either when he found himself in Joyo's arms again that night. And the following night, and the subsequent nights.

Dika still had nightmares, but they didn't last as long.

* * *

Dika maintained that he should keep doing whatever he did, because according to him sparing one or two words of comfort didn't cost anything. Yet his nightmares only became more intense, and even his ever unwavering smile started to quiver. All of them were tired, but exhaustion was looming in his eyes.

Joyo wondered if it's because he gave too much. He and the other volunteers served the people with their expertise. Dika did more; he gave the people that, and hope.

Hope. In a time like this, it's probably the rarest and most valuable commodity one could possess. Hope, after all, was the reason the Rebellion survived and gained victory. But it was not durable. Even Dika was running out of it, because he kept giving his to others.

They'd warned and told and advised him, but he wouldn't listen. He was, after all, the only one who could breathe conviction into the broken. People needed him more than this team did.

If Dika had a fault, it's that he had too much heart to survive. He would keep sacrificing his energy for other people until he had no more left. Joyo couldn't do anything about it. No one could.

(He was never good at fixing people. It was Dika's job, not his. But not even Dika could fix himself.

Joyo could only hold him in his sleep until his sobs smoothened into the steady sounds of regular breathing.)


End file.
